The uh, credit cards and passwords will never be cracked if steam used a real encryption system. It's not a question of having enough power, it's that modern encryption methods are incredibly strong and use cyphers that have never been cracked. Credit card numbers get stolen online from either neglecting to properly store this data (and by doing so break the law, unlikely in the case of a company like Steam which I am sure gets audited), or by capturing the data before it reached the db.

Lauren's correct, "it should only be a matter of time (and horsepower)" is ignorant and fear mongering. Even a token effort to read up on modern cryptography would have been enough to inform you that the time taken to brute-force the encryption Valve is using is on the order of a few trillion years.

Who knows what they actually got. If they got a list of hashed passwords, then they can run the hashed list against a rainbow table. Because they have a lot of passwords, it probably wouldn't be too hard to figure out any salt that they added to the hash. :/

It is law in the US now that they will have to notify by email every single customer because they can't prove who's info was taken and who's wasn't. I believe they have 72 hours to notify customers, I think. I know there is some time limit they have to notify every customer by because of this law.

Lauren is half-right. The credit card data should not crackable. The only way this would happen is if the private key was accessed. This is possible depending on the way Steam implemented its credit card storage since you could use your credit card without passing a special passphrase, but it could have been implemented in such a way that this would be quite difficult.

The passwords are much more likely to be crackable. They are not actually encrypted. Passwords are stored as a cryptographic hash. Valve doesn't tell us which hash was used, but if it was MD5, which is somewhat likely, all but the securest (i.e., longest) passwords will probably be compromised. If it was something more secure, a good password should still be safe.

If you want to know if something can be 'cracked' (that is to say, if the encryption is reversible) then the answer is usually 'yes'. The question is: will it be cracked?

There are many methods to generate an encrypted password hash. The old standard is to use a hash function (such as MD5, SHA1, etc) combined with a salt. This makes it difficult to simply look up the precomputed value of the hash - but not impossible. Considering the incredible speed one can compute the older hashes like MD5 and SHA1, it's perfectly feasible to crack these in days if not hours with a modest amount of CPU/GPU power.

However, there are more modern hash functions such as bcrypt and pbkdf2 which take much much longer to create a hash. The result is it takes much much longer to attempt to crack it. They're not very widely used right now, but their popularity is increasing as more password databases get compromised. It's very unlikely the Steam database was built with one of these hashes in mind.

I don't know how they encrypt or store their credit card data, but one thing's for sure: it has to be reversible for them to decrypt it and process your payment. Thus it's only a matter of cracking the key - which again, depends on the ciphers used, the key length, etc. Is there only one private key protecting all the credit card data? If so, it may be worthwhile to attempt to brute force the entire key. All that really matters is computing power and time. If you're lucky it's complex and large enough that they'll never feasibly be able to crack it.

So how about it, kid? Do you feel lucky?

0·

KwitkoSheriff of Banning (Retired)By the thing near the stuffIcrontian

>If so, it may be worthwhile to attempt to brute force the entire key.

I just want to clarify that it is not really feasible for an individual to brute force anything that has been encrypted with standard asymmetric cryptography techniques. Nothing is possible if they don't have the secret key file. If they do, and it's encrypted like it should be, then the attacker will have to guess the symmetric key used to encrypt the secret key ("passphrase"). This is much more plausible than brute-forcing a key from scratch but it should still be safe if a good passphrase was used.

The data may have been encrypted symmetrically using something like AES or Blowfish. In this case, as in the case of the encrypted secret key, it's much more plausible to crack if a bad passphrase was used, but should be safe if a good passphrase was used. Symmetric encryption is somewhat likely since it would have simplified the automated process of unlocking credit card data.

If someone has your credit card info, it's not so simple as changing your password.

I hope and expect that someone at Valve will provide more technical detail soon.

ACtually the comment aqbout the encryption never being cracked is potentially total rubbish. It all depends on how the passwords are salted - but given the short length of the steam issued passwords a rainbow table attack would be highly effective - in fact i probably have the required rainbow tables sat on my machine at home.

A little bit of investigation would have given the answers needed for this discussion.

What was "hacked" was the Steam forums.

The Steam forums are powered by vBulletin.

Unless they changed the defaults, the vBulletin password hashes are stored using this method:
$hash=MD5(MD5($password)+$salt)

So if you used a dictionary word or a variant of one on the Steam Forums, then it can be pretty easily cracked.

Main danger here: If you used the same password on the Steam Forums as you used elsewhere, then hackers can get into your other accounts. Don't use the same password on different systems!

Likelihood of them getting credit card information is minimal. Same with your actual Steam account, unless you used the same password on there and don't have the SteamGuard two-factor authentication turned on.

If you have never set up an account on the Steam Forums, then don't worry about it.

My password is a long random string of characters, unique to the Steam service. An attacker wouldn't be able to brute force it even if they were using MD5 with no salts. And even if they did, all they'd get access to is my Steam account, not any other accounts.

I also gave Steam a unique email address, which I've never used anywhere else, so if I start to get spam on it, I can just drop it and use a new one.

"While there is no evidence that passwords and credit card information have been compromised, with the state of encryption cracking, it should only be a matter of time (and horsepower)."

What a terribly uninformed statement. Assuming they did the obvious thing and encrypted the information in AES-256, it's not a matter of time or horsepower, it's a matter of ridiculous improbability with respect to the availability of energy. Any viable attacks on AES will not lower it's complexity anywhere close to enough. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html

It's almost like you haven't read any of the news the last two years where companies did the exact opposite with millions of credit card numbers. Let's start with Sony PSN and work our way backwards, shall we?

Reading all this makes me feel like the hacker has gained a billion keys to try on one lock and Valve has suggested changing the lock on the very off chance they use the right key. Because of this many of you are discrediting the suggestion simply because of how unlikely it is they find the right key.

The real problem with this statement, however, is that the two things are unrelated. The encryption most other people are talking about cracking is the encryption used on the credit card numbers. Changing your password won't help that.

Yes, you should change your password because passwords can be brute forced, though it is more difficult as Valve was hashing and salting the passwords (as they should be).

No, a determined enough hacker (or group or organized crime organization) does not have the ability to crack passable modern encryption, provided that Valve was using such methods (as they have claimed). Still, you should keep an eye on your credit card account just in case, but then again you should be doing that anyway.

primesuspect, you are again conflating the issues here. Given enough time, a person can probably crack a hash. This means your password may be exposed. Cryptographic hashes are NOT what is meant by "encryption", so pleased stop applying the term that way -- encryption is only applicable to reversible methods (i.e., something that can be decrypted if you have the keys).

They cannot crack standard encryption standards via brute force. They could not do it if they had all the commodity computers in the world. It takes specially-designed chipsets that are extremely expensive to crack this kind of encryption. The government probably has some, but these are not foolproof; they can only crack keys of insufficient length and they can only do this if they decide you're a "national security" level interest.

The only way the hackers will get that credit card data is if they also got the secret keys, which is not impossible considering that Steam reversed the encryption automatically when you wanted to buy something. But they cannot brute force it given any amount of computing power if it was encrypted properly.

Oh please Jeff guest, nobody is arguing the Von Neumann-Landauer limit. Prime didn't say they could get at it with brute force.
He is only offering sound advice based on the ONLY fact that we know, which is that nobody here knows exactly what happened or exactly how Valve's systems were setup. Sometimes you don't need to hack encryption to get around it.

Changing your password is a good idea, arguing on the Internet isn't. I did both today, so I guess I'm not credible.

Well, somehow my bank knows about this, and has blocked my card as a precaution. Too bad the waiting time for a new one is two weeks, meaning two weeks without any access to any of my accounts. Time to whip out the emergency card.